


Five Times Clint Tries to Cook for Phil and the One Time he Succeeds

by tisfan



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Bad Cooking, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Deaf Clint Barton, M/M, Phil Coulson Has the Patience of a Saint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-08 19:02:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12871005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tisfan/pseuds/tisfan
Summary: Phil makes an offhand remark to his best friend about wishing he didn’t have to do all the cooking.Less than a week later, he wishes he’d never said a word… because Clint decides to cook.





	Five Times Clint Tries to Cook for Phil and the One Time he Succeeds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [uofmdragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/uofmdragon/gifts).



**Foreword**

“So, like,” Daisy said, poking at Clint with her foot under the table, “does Coulson ever bitch to you about the rest of us and you just want to go, I don’t know, smack Fitz around for a while because he’s annoying your bae?”

“First off,” Clint said, “you are way too old to be using bae unironically.” He took a slug of his coffee and contemplated Daisy over the rim of his cup. Daisy Johnson was, actually, quite a bit younger than Clint, but _bae_ just seemed too high school and twee to have to deal with before -- he checked the time… aw, clock, no. Okay, it was _after_ noon, now, and maybe he was going to have to deal with Daisy being all bouncy and enthusiastic. There was only so long he could put it off.

“What’s the other thing?”

“Huh?”

“Well, you said first off, and then went completely off the subject,” Daisy pointed out.

Clint indicated his cup of coffee. “You are not allowed to logic at me before the bottom of the first cup of coffee.”

“Horseshit,” Daisy said, cheerfully. “That’s at least your third cup, if you don’t count that you probably drank directly out of the pot before you left home.”

Damnit, she knew him too well.

“Did you have a real question, or did you just want to try to encourage me to say I’d like to smack Fitz, which, while it could be entertaining, will get me a lecture from Simmons, and that always feels like I’m in a bad episode of _Supernanny_.”

“All right, I’ll stop trying to be subtle,” Daisy said.

Huzzah. Clint tipped his cup in her direction. Continue.

“You need to learn to cook.”

“Excuse you?”

“No, excuse you,” Daisy said. “You’re a grown ass man, Barton. And Coulson’s complained to Melinda that he’d like to come home some nights to dinner, rather than chasing powereds all over the planet and either having to cook himself or eat cold pizza. And when Coulson complains to Melinda…”

“May complains to you.” Clint sighed. He knew how that worked. He supposed he should be grateful that Daisy was the one who’d decided to bring it to his attention. May’s _get your ass in gear and act like a fucking adult lectures_ were ugly, painful, pointed, and left bruises. She’d given him two already, plus a shovel talk and Clint and Coulson had been dating less than three months.

“Yeah, pretty much.” Daisy swallowed the last of her coffee. “I’m not judging. But there are loads of websites there you can find easy recipes. Just… I don’t know. Cook dinner for him. Once in a while. People like to feel appreciated.”

Clint rolled his eyes. Coulson was more likely to feel appreciated if Clint blew him. Cooking… cooking was not a thing Clint knew how to do. Hell, he barely cooked for himself; pizza was a good dinner and cold pizza was a great breakfast, and it was like magic. Clint punched a few buttons on his phone, and in thirty minutes, there was pizza. What more did a man want?

When Coulson heaved a big sigh that night, looking at the pizza box, Clint came to the reluctant conclusion that Coulson might, actually… want more.

 

**One: Under Pressure**

“Yeah, no,” Clint said, pushing ineffectually at Coulson’s shoulders. “Zero of ten, do not go look in the kitchen until I’m done.” He never forgot forgot that Coulson was really strong for a non-powered human, but as Clint was used to pushing around to get them to leave the area, Avenging going on, you do not need a selfie with doombots, thank you, sir, it always struck him again just how stubborn Coulson could be, and…

“Oh, my god,” Coulson managed.

“Yeah, okay, so…”

“What did you do to my kitchen?” Coulson’s voice rose up until he sounded truly plaintive.

Clint winced. “Tried to cook stew?” He waved a hand around at the mess. “This is not my fault--”

Coulson schooled his expression into something that appeared a little less likely to burst into tears at any moment, and more like _I am your ninth grade gym teacher and you are going to do two million push ups_. “I’m quite sure that I’m dying to hear this explanation of how the utter and total destruction of my kitchen is not. Your. fault.”

Awww, boyfriend, no.

“Look, okay, look, I was told this was an easy way to prepare a meal, and I thought I’d done this before, back… a while ago, okay, it was a while ago, but I didn’t realize that crockpots had changed so much--”

“That’s not a crockpot, Clint,” Coulson said. “It’s… well, it was. A pressure cooker. You have to let the steam out or…” He indicated the disaster. “Well, that’ll happen.”

Clint supposed that Coulson had a right to be mad. His kitchen was pretty much wrecked and Clint hadn’t had time to clean up. Not that having half-cooked stew not all over everything would have made things much better. The stove top was caved in and the aforementioned pot was sideways on the top rack, having mauled the burners and the broiler coil on the way down. The steam vent had been smacked right off the wall and the plaster there was torn up (and covered in steamed vegetable glop) and the lid was embedded in the ceiling.

The only good thing, really, Clint could see about the whole debacle, was that no one had been in the kitchen when the bomb dropped (quite literally).

“I guess I’m taking you out to dinner?”

He’d already texted Stark with a picture and a plea for backup. Stark, being Stark, had responded with a witty quip, a promise of a crew over to clean up and repair, a new stove, and the advice to stop cooking before a third world nation was destroyed. Followed up by Pepper, who decided that it was only fair to share some of Stark’s cooking disaster stories, so that Clint didn’t feel like Stark had too much in the way of blackmail material.

He’d been hoping to get Coulson out of the house and merrily ensconced somewhere expensive for dinner and let Stark work his money magic, come home to a clean, repaired kitchen and just pretend this never happened, but… apparently that wasn’t going to… well, happen.

“Yes, yes you are,” Coulson said. He still couldn’t stop staring at the remains of the kitchen.

“And sex,” Clint said, because at least that was something he could do.

“And sex,” Coulson agreed. Still staring.

“And you get to chose the TV for the next week or so,” Clint offered, getting a little desperate.

“And I get to chose the TV.”

Finally, though, Clint managed to pry Coulson out of the mess and get him into the car and out for dinner. But he had to endure Coulson texting May about the accident, and then Daisy furiously texting Clint about being a human dumpster fire, except that if he was actually a fire, someone could grill a burger on him and he wouldn’t be _entirely useless_.

 

**Two: Some like it Hot**

The timer went off and Clint hopped up from his spot on the sofa. Leaned over and kissed Coulson’s cheek. “Dinner’s ready,” he said. Theoretically. But Cap had given him the recipes and they seemed pretty easy, and everything had gone into one of two casserole dishes; one in the oven, one in the fridge.

“They’ll work fine,” Cap had said. “I make it all the time, just layer the ingredients in there, pop it in the oven for about an hour, no problem.”

Clint had even remembered to turn the oven on, and make sure it got hot before setting the timer and walking away.

So, it should be fine, and if nothing else, telling Coulson it was Cap’s recipe should silence any complaints if Clint did something wrong, because Coulson had an adorably stupid little crush on Captain America (which was not exactly the same thing as having a crush on _Steve_ , for which Clint was grateful, because there was no way in hell Clint could actually compete with and win, anyone’s affections away from Steve.)

Clint grabbed his oven mitts and pulled the casserole dish out of the oven. Wrinkled his nose. His dinner smelled like… slightly burned strawberries?

And the container… _sloshed_.

That was worrisome. Clint didn’t know much about cooking, but he did know about his mom’s casseroles (when she wasn’t scared because their dad was tanked off his ass and botched up the cooking job) and they weren’t liquid.

He put the dish down on the counter and lifted the lid.

Oh.

Oh, no.

_Oh, no, no, no._

Crap.

He went to the fridge and took out the _other_ casserole dish.

“Aw, dish, no,” he muttered. Took the lid off that one.

Yep. Raw casserole.

That took an hour to make.

“What…” Coulson was looking in the casserole dish on the counter. “What was this, before it became dinner?”

Clint stared at the floor between his feet. “Jell-o. I got the dishes mixed up.”

He hefted the casserole dish in his hand. “I can still cook this, it’s just… gonna be another hour.”

Across the room, Coulson’s stomach grumbled.

“Or I can make you a sandwich?”

 

**Three: Honey, Aw, Sugar, Sugar**

“Well, it smells good,” Nat commented.

Clint groaned, face in his hands, elbows on the table. “I don’t understand. I followed the recipe.”

Nat scraped at the cookie sheet with a metal spatula. “This is almost impressive.” She tipped the sheet up and dumped a handful of glass-sharp, dark brown and lumpy, cookie disasters onto the cooling tray. She whipped out her phone and took a picture.

“Aw, photographic evidence, no,” Clint complained. “Why?”

“I think Stark might want to analyze this for ablative armor,” Nat teased.

Clint groaned again and considered sliding under the table.

Nat broke a corner off the… well, it wasn’t a cookie, but Clint wasn’t really sure what it was. Sugar, butter, oatmeal, raisins. They were supposed to be cookies -- Coulson’s favorite, no less. Instead, the whole tray of carefully shaped rounded spoonfuls had melted. Pooled together and covered the entire sheet from edge to edge, like some sort of mutant jelly cookie.

“Doesn’t taste terrible,” Nat pointed out. “Kinda like… peanut brickle. Without the peanuts. And a little chewier than brickle.”

“So, nothing like brickle at all.”

“Well, no. And… I can’t imagine how to serve them. They’re either huge chunks or little crumbs. And it’s kinda… hard.”

“Total failure at cookies,” Clint said. The dough had been really tasty; sweet and buttery and Clint might have eaten a few spoonfuls. It tasted like every cookie dough he’d ever eaten that he wasn’t supposed to because salmonella or something like that. Fun-sucking safety concerns. Whatever. He didn’t understand at all what had gone wrong. Some sort of magical meddling had turned his cookies into partially congealed plastic ice cream. Or something. He didn’t even know.

Nat bobbled her head around, not quite agreeing with him, but not willing to say they were actually good cookies, either. Because they totally weren’t.

“So, butter and oatmeal and sugar and--”

“Baking powder and baking soda and eggs,” Clint said, indicating each of the ingredients (or wrappers from the sticks of butter and the egg shells) that were laid out on the counter. And the recipe card.

“And flour,” Nat said.

“What?”

“Flour. You know, white powdery stuff. No, the other white powdery stuff, Clint. Bread’s made out of it,” Nat said. She stared at the ingredients. Picked up the card. “You didn’t add flour.”

Clint got up and checked the recipe card. _¾ cup flour._

“Fuck.”

“It’s okay,” Nat said. “We can fix it. We just need--”

Coulson’s key hit the front door. A moment later, the man himself was hanging up his suit jacket, rolling up his sleeves, and stopping dead in the living room, one eyebrow raised. “Hello, Agent Romanov. What brings you over this evening?”

“Time,” Clint said. “We need _time_. Which we don’t have.”

 

**Four: Breakfast (Syrup)**

Okay, okay. Pancakes weren’t that hard. The batter came out of a box, sure. But he actually mixed milk and two eggs into it. Let it sit while the pan got hot.

Did the little water flick test that four freaking YouTube videos suggested (he wasn’t taking any chances this time, he just wanted one meal to go well. So he watched pancake tutorial videos. The basic ones. If he saw some jackass in an apron adding cinnamon or something to the mix, he was out.) and poured the first puddle of mix into the pan.

Waited until the little bubbles popped up and the edge started to look more solid.

Flipped the cake.

There was a little splash of batter there, kinda made it lopsided, but really, Clint wasn’t going for perfect here, he was going for “someone could eat this and not be sick.”

He was setting the bar really, really low. He knew that. It was okay.

Probably.

Very low bar. He wrapped a few frozen sausage patties in a paper towel and put them in the microwave.

Flipped the pancake out of the pan and poured another one. So far, so good.

Got the sausages out of the microwave and dumped them on the plate.

The oil in the frying pan was smoking a bit, so Clint flipped the pancake and turned on the oven’s fan.

Everything happened in slow motion.

The vent whirred, stirring the air. Smoke went up into the vent, just like it was supposed to.

But the paper towel, with its sausage-grease spot, floated delicately off the counter where it was and fluttered down to land on the side of the stove.

And burst into flame when the corner touched down on the still-hot burner.

“Shit,” Clint hissed. He reached out, snagged the pan and shifted it to another burner. Not a major fire, not a major fire, no need to panic. He grabbed the non-burning side of the paper towel to flip it into the sink--

_Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!_

The smoke alarm went off; dangerously loud and Clint’s ‘aids were already at a high volume in order to keep an ear out for Coulson’s alarm.

Clint jerked, hard. Sent the flaming paper towel over onto the counter; where it hit the side of the bottle of canola oil. And the bottle ignited. A moment later, oil poured all over the floor as the plastic jug fucking melted.

Clint somersaulted backward out of the suddenly flaming kitchen.

“Clint, wha--” Coulson, in his sleep pants and messy hair and a pillow crease on one cheek, stopped dead.

Clint grabbed his bow, flicked a button on the quiver, nocked and fired.

White chemical flame retardant sprayed all over the kitchen, dousing the flames, which was good.

Destroying breakfast, which was not so good.

“So,” Clint said, pasting a big smile on his face. “IHOP?”

 

**Five: Rainbow Stew**

Clint kept the phone tucked between his ear and his shoulder. “If one more person tells me cooking is easy, I’m gonna hand in my resignation letter and go back to assassinating people for a living,” he said.

“Nah, it’s fine,” Kate said. “I don’t cook so well, either, but I’ll walk you through the whole process, step by step. I make this all the time, and you know how klutzy I am.”

“Whenever you don’t have a bow in your hand,” Clint said. “Or if you’re wearing heels.”

“High-heeled shoes are the devil’s work, and you can quote me on that,” Kate said.

“If anyone ever asks me about my opinion on high heels who isn’t Tony Stark, I’ll tell them just that.”

“Yeah,” Kate agreed. “Tony can wear heels if he wants, that butt works it. So… get the biggest pot you’ve got. Whatever the largest one is; we want that. With a lid. That fits. This is a one pot dish.”

Kate took him through the whole process. She’d sent him an emailed list of ingredients and he’d gone to the store and picked them up. He chopped the stewing beef. Browned the beef and put in three cups of water.

“Ok, leave that on low. Look at the burner temperature, Clint, and tell me what the number says. Two. You want it to say _two_. Not one. Not three. And five is _right out_. Now put the lid on it and set a timer for two hours. Come back to the kitchen then, and I’ll call you.”

“Did you just misquote _Monty Python_ at me, girlie-girl?”

“I might have done,” she said. “I’ll call you.”

And Kate was like clockwork. She called him back in precisely two hours and then talked him through vegetable preparation. He peeled a potato. Deseeded and chopped a green pepper (he didn’t even know green peppers had seeds, how had he not known that? But anyway, none of them allowed in the stew.) Carrots and celery and onion.

“Put a bay leaf on the top. Don’t crush it or anything, just sit it on there. And remember it’s there, you’re going to want to find it and take it out before you serve your soup. Bay leaves add flavor, but they’re not very good eating.”

“Cover it and cook for another half an hour or so. Now, I gotta go, I have a date tonight with America,” Kate said.

“Aw, say hi for me,” Clint said.

“Will do. Now write this down, it’s the last step,” Kate said. “Just before you get ready to serve it, take a half cup of cold water and two tablespoons of flour, mix them together until all the lumps are gone. Then stir that mixture into the stew. It’s what makes it all thick. Got that?”

“I got it, girlie-girl. Thanks,” Clint said. “You’re a lifesaver.”

“I learned from the best. You wrote that down, right?”

“I wrote it down.” He did. Wrote it down. On a piece of paper and everything. Took Lucky for a quick walk.

And apparently, he discovered, the piece of paper had maybe gotten stuck to the poop bag? Or maybe when he’d dug the bag out of his pocket, the piece of paper had fluttered away? Or something. Because when he got back to the kitchen twenty seven minutes later, he couldn’t find it.

He called Kate, but she was obviously already on her date because she didn’t answer.

What was it? Two… two tablespoons of water and half a cup of flour? Or was it half a cup of water and two cups of flour?

That sounded right.

… it was wrong.

Oh, god, whatever he’d done, it was wrong.

This wasn’t stew.

This was… like thick, lumpy porridge with vegetables?

Clint turned the burner off and stared at the stuff in the pot. Put the lid back on.

Sat down on the kitchen floor and buried his face in his hands.

“You just… you need a new boyfriend,” he told Coulson through his fingers. “I… just suck.”

 

**+1: Too Many Cooks**

“No, you don’t,” Coulson said. He sat down on the floor next to Clint. “You know, when I was seven years old, my mom taught me to make Campbell’s tomato soup. It’s pretty simple… you open the can, dump the stuff in a pot. Stir in a can’s worth of milk or water. They make the can the right size, you don’t even have to guess. One can of soup, one can of milk. She was just starting a new job, and sometimes she wasn’t going to be home for dinner. I could barely see over the stove, but I got a stool and I could stir the soup and wait for it to be hot.”

Clint sighed. Coulson was a good cook. He made great steaks, stir fry, homemade bread. Crepes. Lasagna.

“And I already knew how to make toast,” Coulson continued. “And I discovered that if you took a piece of toast and then microwaved a piece of cheese on top, you got a poor-man’s grilled cheese. And that was my dinner. Pretty much every weeknight from when I was seven until I was maybe ten or so.”

“Yeah?” Clint always had trouble imagining Coulson as a child.

Of course, Coulson’s childhood was something out of a fairy story anyway. A father who cared, who wasn’t a raging drunk, who taught his son to play baseball in the back yard. A mom who worked, but still made sure her kid ate. His mom had worked, and Barney had stolen Spaghettios from the grocery store to keep them fed, because Dad drank up every scrap of money they had. They’d eaten it cold out of the can, because half the time, they didn’t have money for power.

“Uh-huh,” Coulson said. “And when I complained to my mom that I was bored with that, she gave me a book. _Joy of Cooking_. And every weekend, from then on, we’d go through the book, and I’d pick a few things I wanted to try, and she’d tell me if she thought I could handle it. Buy ingredients together in the grocery store. And I learned to cook. One recipe, one experiment, at a time.”

“I’ve been--”

“I made mistakes,” Coulson said. “A lot of them. And I was twelve, thirteen. Couldn’t order a pizza if I messed up. So I ate a _lot_ of failed experiments. It’s okay to not get it right the first time. Or even the fifth time. Cooking is a skill. It takes time to get good at it.”

Clint snorted.

“Come on,” Coulson said, getting to his feet. “I’ve got something for you.”

“Yeah?”

Coulson opened the pantry, pulled something out.

A loaf of bread. And a can of tomato soup.

“Let’s make dinner.”


End file.
